Blog: August 2005

“Dreamweaver 8 for Dummies”

August 15, 2005

So, we’ve been under NDA until recently about a project we’ve been involved with.

There’s a new version of Dreamweaver coming out in September.  Macromedia announced it on Aug. 8, but the book has been in the writing stages for a few months.  Here’s the announcement…

Dreamweaver 8 is Macromedia’s latest release of the industry-leading tool for designing and developing websites and applications. New Dreamweaver 8 features include expanded Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) layout visualization for easier design, drag-and-drop integration of XML data feeds, improved code hinting support for XML and XSLT, enhanced usability features such as zoom and code collapse to streamline the development process, and easier ways to incorporate Flash Video content onto websites.

XSLT hinting support!  Code collapse!  Zoom!  But, what does it have to do with Hop Studios?  Susie wrote several chapters, and Travis had his first hands-on experience in the publishing industry.  He was the technical editor for the entire book—all 18 chapters.  Heady stuff.

Is this a big upgrade for Dreamweaver?  I’ll let you be the judge (because I can’t say anything about it just yet)—but I am excited to have technical edited the book, and the editor and primary author were both quite complimentary about how I did, calling me “regular,” “grizzled” and “keen.” These are things technical editors aspire to be, I think.

I should also add that Hop Studios has several of its clients’ Web sites featured in the book, as examples of sites that use the latest and greatest Dreamweaver features.  I’ll share more about that once the book comes out.

Posted by Travis Smith at 5:03 PM | Comments (0)

“BitTorrent for Dummies” Really Done

August 15, 2005

Remember this?  Yeah, well, writing a book is just the big hard part.  There’s a smaller hard part, editing the book.  Last Friday, Susie finished that part as well.  The book is 344 pages, and it’s now in the hands of some hard-working editors, publicists and the U.S. judicial system.

Slowly but surely, we’re moving towards a five-day work week again.  And when the book comes out in October, we’ll have a nice little party to celebrate.  You’re invited.

Posted by Travis Smith at 4:53 PM | Comments (0)

J-Learning Achieves Lift-Off

August 15, 2005

A year ago, Hop Studios began an ambitious, challenging, fascinating project: To develop a how-to guide for community journalism sites. It’s done, and it’s called J-Learning, and it’s spectacular.

The project was funded by J-Lab, The Institute for Interactive Journalism.  J-Lab is based at the University of Maryland, and has a really noble mission: to promote innovative news experiments that improve public life.

Well, when J-Lab approached us to help them develop this multi-phased project, we were thrilled.  Still are thrilled.  In fact, I’m positively amazed at how well this project came out.

What we’ve done in the past year, is create an example of well-done community-service Web site that encourages discussion on and around the topic of building community, reporting news, and creating well-run Web sites.  It’s currently 81 articles, 75,000 words, 180 images, and a heck of a lot of work. It also represents one of Hop Studios’ biggest and best projects to date, and I’d love to hear your feedback about it.

And in the mean time, it’s also a wonderful example of a working community news and information site that includes a raft of features. There’s…

  • per article commenting
  • discussion forums
  • an article rating system
  • an auto-detectable syndication feed
  • it’s all done with really efficient and snazzy CSS layouts
  • it adjusts to any size monitor
  • it has a collapsable navigation bar that remembers its state as you navigate the site
  • you can subscribe to certain articles to keep track of discussion
  • there’s private messaging and a member list
  • the site search is extremely powerful

    With all this, the site still does the most important thing that any site can do: it loads fast. Yep, amazing.

    So, what does it cover?  Well, current, it helps you go from zero, through
    initial planning of your community site,
    registering a domain name,
    finding web hosting,
    hiring a designer or developer,
    buying hardware and software,
    basic HTML,
    page layout and design,
    file management (including wikis),
    databases
    ...

    ... and if I do say so myself, the databases section is particularly well written and interesting ...

    ... It then goes on to describe photography and graphics,
    audio,
    video,
    animation,
    community data (don’t just wonder what it is, click it!), and of course,
    blogs.

    Finally, we took a stab at
    advertising and marketing,
    sales, fundraising and e-commerce,
    tracking your users and
    law and ethics.

    Is the site perfect?  no.  I wish it had been done in wiki format, and I wish we had more on almost every topic.  I also wish we’d gotten it done sooner—small news startups, and citizen journalism, and hyper-local community media, are all the rage now, and the sooner we launch this, the sooner we can start participating.

    But that’s probably just the little imperfections that we see ‘cause we made it.  Between Susie and I, there’s a lot of pooled journalism and Web site experience.  This Web site is only the beginning—I expect that there could be a text book based on this.  So stay tuned for even more news about J-Learning.

    Posted by Travis Smith at 3:53 PM | Comments (0)